


To the Nines

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Magical Realism, Pining, Time Travel, fortunes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 22:36:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3464585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John skips forward in time, and Sherlock reads the signs that point to nine. John knows he'll eventually be with Sherlock, but the waiting is nearly impossible, and his body is a lot more than transport.</p><p>A foray into magical realism where all the canon events occur, and a hell of a lot more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To the Nines

**Author's Note:**

> This work is really a short experimental piece - though it's complete. I'm trying to get my head around some different magical realism tropes in preparation for a longer piece.

John is a time skipper.

He doesn’t know any others, only knows he’s not the only one. He’s glimpsed them, at the periphery of his vision, shadows clinging to the edges of his here and now. It’s not like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, not quite, not exactly. No science fiction, this, with visits to other worlds, or stays longer than a few agonizing heartbeats. He doesn’t talk about it, this gift, this curse. Not anymore, anyway. Not since Harry laughed at him, and called him queer.

 _Queer._ It was a loaded word in its day, and she used it as both weapon and shield.

With John, time skips forward like an old fashioned record, giving him moments, snapshots, before the needle jumps back to where he belongs. He’s in no danger of losing the present, not as far as he can tell, and he’s never missed anything here or lost himself except in quiet, contemplative moments. The tells are few – a vacant stare, a fumble for words, a slow blink back into reality.

No one notices, or if they do notice, they don’t call it to his attention. He’s always had reasons to be not quite all there, hasn’t he? The stress of war, of his not idyllic childhood, of the losses he’s suffered. 

He only sees forward, into a future that is sometimes familiar, sometimes surprising. Never backward, never a restful moment of introspection, or the chance to see his mum again. Memory must suffice for those visits, memory and the night terrors he still suffers despite the therapy forced upon him. 

He’s learned to live with it, because he must. Made it through the war knowing there was a bullet with his name on it. Knowing he’d survive to go home. He sees seminal moments, and seemingly unimportant ones. Feels pain, tastes blood and tears, hears the echoing promises of tomorrow.

He gets only glimpses, stolen moments. Not chronological, either, so that he sees Sherlock beside him at his wedding before he sees Sherlock fall, and the first time he sees him, he’s at his bedside in hospital, and he’d have thought him his patient except for the cold ache in his heart, and his fingers entwined with Sherlock’s. His glimpses of his future are out of order, disconnected. But there are only two persistent themes that connect them – all of them – since he’s reached adulthood.

There is war. And there is Sherlock.

Sometimes he thinks they’re one and the same.

He’s never seen this moment, has never known just when he’d meet the man whose face he first glimpsed when he was still at uni, when he’d hear his name spoken in the voice that makes his heart stand still. Lately, as time has stretched out before him, he’s wondered if any of it is real – but the war was real, every glimpse of it he’d had _before_ , every dying breath of every soldier bleeding out beneath his fingers.

He just wants to get _on_ with it.

He’s gasped for breath under the suffocating weight of wood and heat of fire, run across London rooftops, pressed his hands against Sherlock’s bleeding chest, dizzy with shock. He’s watched him fall from a rooftop, limbs akimbo, puppet-like, stop motion. He’s danced with a bride in his arms, and kissed a man, pushed him up against a stairway wall. In glimpses of this ever-spinning future, he stands before a black marble tombstone and though the words upon it are blurred through his tears, they imprint themselves forever on his consciousness. It tips him, unbalances him. He wants this life, despite the grief it promises. He wants the rush of adrenaline. He wants the thrill of the chase. He wants to feel like his heart is too big for his chest, that it’s beating too fast, that it’s about to explode in a glorious shattering spray of fireworks to cover the nothingness that is every day since they loaded him up and shipped him out of Afghanistan.

He even aches for the old man he’ll become, standing against a window with Sherlock’s hand in his own, following Sherlock’s finger with his eyes as it traces the flight of a honey bee in the air outside the window.

He knows he loses Sherlock, and finds him again, and nothing makes sense, and everything is so fucking confusing it ties him up in knots, but he _wants_ it. He’s always looking for it – for him – not for the bride in his arms because even then he is craning his neck to look for Sherlock. His life’s been on pause for far too long and he’s so goddamn afraid that he’s wrong and it’s not time yet and he’ll need to start at the surgery and he’d rather step in front of a lorry and –

No.

Mike Stamford saves him, when he’s as low as he’s been since leaving hospital, and suddenly John is staring at Sherlock bloody fucking Holmes, and he wants to drop onto his knees and kiss the ground because he’s been waiting all his life for this.

He falls in love with Sherlock that very moment, even before Sherlock deduces him and explains his deductions. He’s never had more than a few words together from Sherlock, in all these time skips, and hearing him now, cock-sure of himself, but off-handed, focus elsewhere, is almost – almost – worth the wait.

Already, ten minutes into this promised future, this now, he wonders how he’ll live without him when he’s gone.

ooOOOoo

The gun is warm in his hands, and as he lowers it, tucks it back into his waistband and pulls his jumper down over it, he sees what he’s never been able to see before. Sherlock stands. Stares out the window. Turns away again.

He’s been here before, but he’s never given enough time to understand, to process, to connect. He’s held this smoking gun, stood by the marble tombstone, seen a dozen different ways Sherlock could die.

He exhales his relief, marking off another scenario. Not by his hand, then. This bullet was not for Sherlock.

Over the years, he’s learned to live in the moment as best he can. He doesn’t know how long he has – how long _they_ have – so every day is an adventure, a new beginning, a possible end. But Sherlock makes it very clear that his body is transport, and though John watches, and waits, there are no signs from Sherlock that they will ever be anything more than friends. 

But John has seen. Has seen a future where they sit hand in hand on a park bench, wake up together in tangled sheets. He has kissed those lips, tasted that breath, fallen asleep in those arms, woken to that glorious mouth on his cock. In their life together, the life he can almost taste, he shares even more intimate moments than these – cards his fingers through Sherlock’s curls, leans against him as he plays the violin.

But he cannot rush the future – there is danger in even thinking that thought. 

There is nothing to do but wait. Wait for it. 

_It_ is the sniper sight on his chest. _It_ is Baskerville. _It_ is following a sheet-clad Sherlock into Buckingham Palace, standing stock-still with the barrel of a gun pressed into his temple.

It is watching Sherlock fall from the roof of Barts. It is holding his wrist, seeing his blood.

It is spending two years visiting his grave, knowing he can’t be dead. Asking for the miracle he knows must come. 

But hearing no word. Nothing. 

Leaving Baker Street. Finally moving on when the silence grows too long, too loud. When another day without Sherlock is unbearable, the loaded gun in his drawer mocking him, mocking his pain.

He finds a reason to go on.

ooOOOoo

Mary is perfect for him. (Mary is all wrong.)

Mary makes him _feel_. (But Mary does not make him forget.)

He’s seen the wedding – glimpses of it, knows he is happy in the moment. Knows Sherlock is there, and wonders – wonders – if the wedding is what makes Sherlock come home. If his fate, his future, with Mary, _with Sherlock_ , is really in his own hands. He wants him back. He doesn’t want to live more days with Mary and without Sherlock. He imagines a reunion that throws them into each other’s arms, convinces himself that the bride in his arms in that tangled future is someone else’s.

(It is. Yet she’s his too.)

(His daughter, years later, and he waltzes with her as tears stream down his face while Sherlock plays for them. He should have recognized, in those fast-forwarded glimpses of this day, that this is a John from another day, an older self, more grey, more worn, more happy.)

He is already living with Mary when Sherlock comes home at the worst (best) possible time. Regrettably, he is the same Sherlock, body is transport, pick up where we left off. 

John’s body is not transport. John is tired of waiting. John will tempt fate, challenge the future.

(But is he challenging the future or is the future challenging him?)

John marries Mary. He loves her. He _does_ love her. (He loves Sherlock more.)

In the years he spends with Mary after the wedding, John skips ahead a thousand times. 

Sometimes, he thinks he is dreaming, fantasizing. Of a world that could have been – should have been – just beyond his grasp. Always, Sherlock is there. Always, Mary is not. And Olivia dances through his days, and he cannot reconcile it. He’s taken a misstep somewhere, altered the fabric of time. Rushed the engagement, the marriage, forced Sherlock to return before it was time. The paradox unnerves him, unsettles him, and he feels always on the knife’s edge. It isn’t fair – not to Mary, not to Sherlock. 

Not to John. Not to John Watson, who waited half his life to meet Sherlock, and another decade after that to make it right.

He begins to put together the sequence of the resolution before it happens. He’s finally skipped through enough distant corners of the future to know that there is never a Mary is his nine-fingered moments. He is in 221B, sitting on the sofa, Olivia tucked in at his side, staring at his bandaged hand. He is sitting across from Mycroft at a polished mahogany desk, his right hand splayed out before him. Three fingers and a thumb. He is rolled into a protective ball on the pavement, clutching his bloody hand against his chest, and Sherlock is running at him from across the street, barreling toward him, and John freeze-frames the look in his eyes and builds a mind palace for that single memory.

He is sitting on the sofa with Sherlock, left hand threaded with Sherlock’s right, the age-roughened fingers of his own right hand holding a teacup. There is no pinky to point, just the nub of a missing digit. The skin there is unnaturally smooth.

He doesn’t miss it. It is nothing to his everything.

ooOOOoo

Sherlock has texted and he’s hurrying to meet him, glad to be away from the mounting tension at home. He’s distracted, and late, and he picks up his pace, nearly jogging when he rounds the corner.

He recognizes the street as he turns. Recognizes the man lurking there, who pushes off the wall and comes at him from the side.

He throws out his right hand as he reaches for his gun with his left. 

A shot out of nowhere and his hand explodes in pain. He slides, loses his footing, falls on his hip, stares at his hand, at the blood still spurting. Looks up to see Sherlock charging toward him. 

He’s seen this before. Been here before. And he knows that this is the moment, the turning point, the end and the beginning.

The relief is the relief of a lifetime. A weight gone, evaporated in a single poignant flash of pain and flesh and bone.

He reaches out with his bloodied hand to cup Sherlock’s cheek, and tastes blood in their first kiss.

 

__

Sherlock

Sherlock was born on the ninth day of the ninth month, and there are dozens of photographs of him as a child with a nine on his forehead. A curl with a strand of hair hanging down out of it – everyone would tug at it, say he was dressed to the nines.

Utter rot.

Nine follows him throughout his life. Plagues him. Phone numbers. Hotel rooms. Lock combinations. He deletes the solar system to remove the nine planets from his memory, deletes Lady Jane Grey, the famous nine-day monarch. There are nine cabinets in the kitchen, nine pockets in his coat, nine rooms in his childhood home. He keeps nine different packs of cigarettes hidden in 221B, and stirs his tea nine times without fail. He has nine bolt holes, nine alter egos, nine contacts – exactly nine – in his phone.

No one notices. Why would anyone notice?

When he is twenty-nine, an old Traveller woman stares at him as he turns her gently over in the corner of a littered drug den, looks _into_ him, breathes into his soul, and tells him with her dying breath to wait for the nine-fingered man.

“He’ll be your salvation,” she says in a throaty whisper. She reaches up to tug at the unruly curl on his forehead, and he knows what she is seeing. “He’ll be your one and only.”

He wants it not to be true. He would rather not need saving, would rather not need anyone at all.

But he knows by now to read the signs.

ooOOooo

John Watson comes to him on a sunny day with all ten fingers intact, leaning on a cane he does not need. Sherlock quickly loses his heart to him, and wonders where John goes when his eyes grow unfocused, and he stumbles over words, and looks at him like he’s looking at another Sherlock, a better man, someone this Sherlock is not and cannot be.

They live a fast life with sharp corners, the kind of life that can’t remain on course forever. And soon enough, life spins out of control. By the time Sherlock has cleaned up his own mess, and struggles to the surface again, John has Mary, and Olivia comes on her heels, and Sherlock stands to the side with his pupils blown wide and his heart bleeding for John, but it is too late. He’s missed something crucial, and it plagues him like the bullet in his chest, but he pulls it together and keeps going and wishes John would stop _looking_ at him like that.

Like he’s waiting for something. A signal from Sherlock. Looking past and through every word he says, every gesture he makes. Like he’s alive, and marginally happy, but only just…only getting enough air to breathe, but not enough to soar. Like he’s choking on his happiness, strangled by the kind of life every man (every man but Sherlock) wants to have.

Sometimes, Sherlock catches John staring at his fingers.

Sometimes, Sherlock stares at them too.

Until the day he skids to a halt at John’s side, and drops to his knees beside him. There’s so much blood, but John is alive, and he reaches out for Sherlock with his bloodied hand. He is shaking – they’re both shaking – and Sherlock meets John’s jubilant eyes, and lets himself be pulled against him, and tastes John’s blood in their first kiss.

ooOOOoo

There are nine scars on John’s body, and nine moles on his back. Sherlock likes to trace lines across his skin, connecting them in a starburst dot to dot, and kiss the stump of the missing finger, and lace the fingers of both their hands together.

Sherlock doesn’t know this – but John does – that he’ll live with John ‘til the end of his days, and retire to the coast, and keep bees, and turn Olivia into a beekeeper to spite John’s lack of interest.

And when John skips ahead into the future now, be bumps up against the horizon. He’s on a quiet shore, where warm waves wash gently at his bare feet, tugging out the sand from beneath them. He’s slowly sinking, but Sherlock has his back.

The wind fills their sails. It feels a lot like flying.

_Fin_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] To The Nines](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3541097) by [aranel_parmadil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aranel_parmadil/pseuds/aranel_parmadil)




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